Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1781 edition. Excerpt: ... aggrandize ideas which are of a rank superior to themselves. Whenever any object, how great soever, becomes familiar to the the mind, and its relations to other objects is no longer attended to, the sublime vanishes. Milton's battle of the angels, after the prelude to the engagement, would have been read with no greater emotions than are excited by the history of a common battle, had not the poet perpetually reinforced his sublime, as it were, by introducing frequent comparisons of those superior beings, ' and their actions, with human combatants and human efforts. It is plainly by means of comparison that Horace gives tis so subline an idea of the unconquerable firmness of Cato j' Et cuncta terrarum fubacta, ...' Praeter atrocetn animum Cattfnis. For the fame reason a well-conducteddiwax a extremely favourable to the sublime. In this form of a sentence, each subsequent idea is compared with the preceding; so that if the former have "been represented as large, the latter, which exceeds it, must appear exceedingly large. The effect of this we fee in that sublime passage of Shakespeare, inscribed upon his monument is Westminster Abbey: The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, And all which it inherit, shall dissolve, . f And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, Shall leave no wreck behind....., The The intermediate ideas which are introduced to increase the sublime, by means of comparison with the object: whose grandeur is to be inhanced by them, ought to be of a similar nature; because there is no comparison of things diflirnilar. The difference between them should be nothing more than that of greater and less; and even in, this cafe, it often happens that the contrast of things..show more